[TANGO-L] Community Development

[Andrew Allison <andrew @AALLISON.COM>]

Dear List,

Haven't we rather beaten the music aspect to death? I'd like to initiate
another community development thread, namely the importance of teaching
skills. First, I should disclose that I've only been dancing for 10 months.
However, in that time I've managed to go to Buenos Aires twice, spent a
week at Portland Tangofest, and attended at least a half-dozen other
workshops in addition to taking private lessons from several teachers. For
what it's worth, I've also been a student of Tai Chi for close to 20 years,
and teach it.

I would suggest that one of the major problems in community development is
retaining prospective leaders; that many instructors fail to recognize the
basics of successfully teaching them; and the result is that many beginning
leaders quit in frustration.

First and foremost, it's critical to enforce partner rotation in order to
ensure that the leaders dance with a broad cross-section of followers, and
hence learn to lead clearly. This is not as easy as it could be because of
the almost universal failure to enforce the line of dance with no
overtaking, which results in pseudo-rotation (and who hasn't seen dancers
move before the rotation to obtain the partner of his/her choice when it
occurs. Real rotation would also alleviate the gender imbalance problem.

Second, I would argue that since a follower should be able to follow a
clear lead from anybody who can provide it, the instructor's primary task
is to make sure that the leaders can do so.

Finally, it appears to me that many instructors come to a workshop with the
intention of "teaching" a certain number of steps, regardless of whether
they are actually learned, rather than ensuring that (almost) every leader
is capable of leading each step confidently before moving on to the next
one. I would submit that the only way an instructor can be certain that
their job is done is to see each leader execute the step with at least two
followers. A happy and tango-filled New Year to all! Andrew